ON THE DESCRIPTION OF PERCEPTION

Husserl seems to have devoted roughly equal amounts of energy and pages to the description of perception, judgement, and imagination. By “description,” he meant the analysis of the traits and components of mental states or acts and their objects. As his views changed over the years about the nature of intentionality and philosophy, the descriptive psychology of the Logical Investigations (1900/01) gave way to descriptive programmes in which the objects of perception and of judgement were conceived of in terms of a new, analytic framework; in particular Husserl lost interest in describing the things and processes in the real world that are the objects of perception and judgement and so too in describing their relations to these acts. His new analytic framework, particularly as it applies to perception, has been thoroughly expounded and discussed in the literature. My aim here is to expound Husserl's first descriptions of perception within the framework of the Investigations and to incorporate as far as possible his later descriptive results to the extent that these are separable from his later turn to idealism.

Mark Twain was always intensely engaged by two important nineteenth-century cultural conversations, one addressing issues of race, the other theories of the unconscious. His later writings in particular are known both for their explicit anti-imperialism, and the charged racial awareness it produced, and for their flirtation with spiritualism, dream theory, and a variety of occult phenomena. Each of these cultural arenas, the racial and the psychological, has been recognized individually as a major force shaping Twain's imagination, but how they might have interacted to produce his large body of late, mostly unfinished (and some unpublished) writings has yet to be determined. The later works, the group of fantastic, quasiphilosophical pieces, now published in volumes with such titles as Which Was the Dream? and Other Symbolic Writings of the Later Years and Mark Twain's Fables of Man, all written around the time of Twain's 1895-6 world lecture tour and after, are themselves part of the challenge, in that they have always raised for readers and scholars a range of fundamental problems: at issue are their textual status and generic location, their aesthetic “incoherence,” and their apparent “retreat” from both the humor and the social and political engagement that make Mark Twain one of our bestloved national authors.

Edmund Husserl is generally considered to be one of the greatest German philosophers of the twentieth century. Even though the influence of his works has waned somewhat on the European continent, his star is rising in the Anglo-Saxon world. Analytic philosophy has assimilated Husserl as a fellow-contributor to the research programme of a theory of meaning. In particular, Husserl's concept of noema is often regarded as a richer and generalized alternative to the Fregean notion of Sinn.

How should one evaluate Husserl's place in the history of modern philosophy? Seen from an analytical perspective, Husserl may appear to be a transitional thinker, well ahead of his time, who anticipated the linguistic turn. Many passages from his works might be quoted to substantiate this interpretation. Husserl claims, for instance, that “all real unities are unities of sense.”

Twain is famous for his jeremiads against European imperialism and the fledgling efforts of the United States at colonial expansion in the Philippines. As scholars have pointed out, most of Twain's anticolonial zeal dates from the late 1890sand early 1900s, provoked by such international crises as the Spanish-American War (1898), the Boxer Rebellion in China (1900) , and the Boer War in South Africa (1899-1902). Twain's rage over U.S. annexation of the Philippines in “To the Person Sitting in Darkness” (1901) and “A Defense of General Funston” (1902), the cruel despotism of Belgium's Leopold I in the Congo Free State in “King Leopold's Soliloquy”(1905), and Czar Nicholas II's exploitation of Russians, Poles, and Finns in “The Czar's Soliloquy” (1905) belongs to the historical period in which “imperialism” had entered the popular vocabulary as a term of opprobrium.'

THE MIND-BODY PROBLEM IN HUSSERL

Husserl is often read as an idealist, more like Kant than Berkeley, or else as a dualist, with epistemological motivations like those of Descartes. It would be only fitting for Husserl then to set aside the physical world and study pure consciousness. Phenomenology, the science of consciousness, would become the whole of philosophy.

However, when we look closely at what Husserl says about mind and body, when we read Husserl with an eye to the mind-body problem per se, his metaphysics looks very different. Husserl fashioned an intricate ontology of mind and body, coordinated with a rich phenomenology of our awareness of body and mind, as well as an epistemology of the kinds of evidence we have about body and mind. I propose to excavate and reconstruct Husserl's ontology of mind and body, along with the coordinate phenomenology. The result is a monism of substrata (individuals or events) and a pluralism of essences, as well as senses, of body and mind (which may apply to the same individuals or events). This many-aspect monism (not Husserl’s term) is obscured by the superstructure of Husserl’s “transcendental idealism,” which does not set well on the monistic foundation. We shall remove (in a sense, deconstruct) that superstructure, revealing and restoring the underlying monism.

What roles did women play in Mark Twain's life, and what roles did Twain assign them in his work? Until recently, most critics who have addressed these questions at all have tended to fall into one of two camps: those who felt women were bad for Twain and those who felt Twain was bad for women. Both of these positions have their supporters, yet each is flawed.

The “women were bad for Twain” argument was first voiced by Van Wyck Brooks in his influential 1920 study, The Ordeal of Mark Twain, in which he charged women - and Twain's wife, Livy, in particular - with having censored, bowdlerized, and emasculated Twain's work. “From the moment of his marriage,” Twain's “artistic integrity,” Brooks wrote, was “virtually destroyed.” Justin Kaplan, in his 1966 Pulitzer Prize-winning biography, blamed Livy for having forced her bankrupt husband to embark on a grueling schedule of lecturing to pay back his creditors when easier (and, in Livy's view, less ethically spotless) routes had been available to him. Whether they were editing his prose or editing his person, whether they were running up household expenses that forced Twain to write too much or creating moral imperatives that allowed him to write too little, women were “bad for Twain.” So the argument went.

The title of this essay raises a vexing set of questions: What justifies the racial categorization of critical opinion? Do all black critics share a critical consensus on Twain, or at least a range of opinions, that distinguishes them from other critics: “white” critics, “brown” critics, and so on? If so, how is it that race constitutes the basis for a critical consensus; and if it does not, what is the point of surveying critical perspectives on the basis of race? Are there not some white critics who agree with some black critics; and if so, should they not be included in the discussion? The effect of treating black critics as a group separate from other critics is to segregate them from the majority of critics and criticism concerned with Mark Twain. However instructive it may be to regard such critics as a separate group, the troubling implications of segregation remain.

This being the case, is there anything, apart from social convention, that justifies the topic "black critics and Mark Twain"? Perhaps not. Such a question can always be qualified, however, by the criteria that define justification. In ideal terms, race ought not matter as a way of categorizing critical literature. Unfortunately, social conventions cannot be dismissed simply because they are intellectually spurious. In criticism, as well as in every other aspect of American life, our perceptions and attitudes are indelibly race-coded. Conceptually, racial categories make no sense, but in actual experience, race continues to be definitive. Regrettably, race continues to matter.

During the past decade or more, the field of literary studies has been a notoriously embattled one. The battles within and around it, sometimes referred to as “the culture wars ” or “the canon wars, ” have expressed in various ways the deepening identity conflict not only of this academic discipline but of the contemporary American society and culture of which it is a part. In literary studies, the conflict has centered around an issue that may be broadly characterized as the politics of literary performance. This issue has arisen out of powerful challenges - often posed by women and ethnic minorities, who have only lately entered the professoriate in significant numbers - to the dominant view among academic critics since the Second World War that literary works, their authors, and the activity of evaluating and interpreting them transcend, or at least are separable from, matters of partisan politics and considerations of the marketplace. With increasing influence, the challengers of this view have insisted on the political and economic determinants, values, and consequences of “literary performance,” a term I mean to encompass both what literary works express and, more generally, what their authors and their interpreters do. The practices of literary authorship and literary instruction and criticism, that is, are themselves kinds of literary performance. And according to the discipline's recent insurgents (now, arguably, its elite), literary studies must interrogate the political conditions and capacities not only of literary objects but of these practices as well.

EXPLORING THE JOKE OF JOKES: THE NATURE O F RELIGIOUS BELIEF

“Place yourself at the centre of a man's philosophic vision, ” William James counseled, “and you understand at once all the different things it makes him write or say. But keep outside, use your post-mortem method, try to build the philosophy out of simple phrases, first taking one and then another in seeking to make them fit and of course you fail. You crawl over the thing like a myopic ant over a building, tumbling into every microscopic crack or fissure, finding nothing but inconsistencies, and never suspecting that a centre exists. ” Unfortunately, the critic cannot wholly disregard the “postmortem ” method, and so it is inevitable that “inconsistencies ” - even radical contradictions - will frustrate any attempt to find that satisfying artistic wholeness or philosophical unity we seek - or sometimes never suspect exists - in a writer of Mark Twain's complexity and stature. This does not mean that the critical struggle to place ourselves at the “centre ” can be dispensed with; rather, we must pursue the task in the expectation that any judgment we make of what that “centre ” finally is will at least yield us a measure of consistency in all the inconsistencies we are bound to discover.

As the home of Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, and the Alcotts, the very name of Concord, Massachussetts, connotes sophisticated literary dissent. Yet a month after the publication of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, the committee in charge of Concord's public library voted to remove the book from its shelves, fearing that Huck Finn's irreverence would undermine the morals of young readers. In full agreement, Louisa May Alcott proposed a more radical ban: “If Mr. Clemens cannot think of something better to tell our pure-minded lads and lasses,” she advised, “he had best stop writing for them. ” Jo March would not be allowed to play with Huck.

Thus far, the banning of Huckleberry Finn is a familiar sort of ironic anecdote whereby Alcott and the cultural guardians of Concord reveal their moral timidity, their literary obtuseness, or both. But the story does not end here with the self-exposure of an ostensibly enlightened authority. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn did go on, of course, to become the American classic, and generations of children were duly made to read it. What makes this turnabout remarkable, and unlike the elevation of, for instance, Madame Bovary after it too was to be banned or, nearer home, the ascension of Pierre into a classic and a cult, is that the canonization of Twain's novel has not involved significant rereading. The Huckleberry Finn celebrated as the archetypal American novel is acclaimed precisely for being, as the Concord critics charged, "rough, coarse, and inelegant," and especially for featuring a hero who lies, uses profanity, and steals besides, a boy who everyone agrees is, as to class and culture, the "veriest trash." When Bernard DeVoto declared Adventures of Huckleberry Finn the preeminent American novel (maybe approached but certainly not surpassed by Moby-Dick) , he took it as generally understood that jettisoning elegance and refinement through a vernacular narration was the novel's most spectacular achievement. "It is the one book in our literature," Leo Marx noted, "about which highbrows and lowbrows can agree."

Husserl's third Logical Investigation is perhaps the most significant treatise on the concept of part to be found in the philosophical literature. In it Husserl attempts to analyze the notion of dependent part, to lay down the principles governing its use, and to relate it to more general considerations concerning the nature of necessity and unity.

He begins his study with the consideration of objects in the psychological sphere. A typical example of the kind of object he has in mind is that of a visual datum, a red patch, let us say, and its various aspects or “moments” - its colour, say, or its extension. He takes each of these moments to be peculiar to the object in question; no other datum, no matter how great its resemblance to the original datum, will have the very same moments. He also takes the moments to be, in a suitably broad sense, part of the given object; they are thought to be actually present in it.

Now Husserl is struck, as was his teacher Stumpf, by a peculiar ontological difference between the datum and its moments. The moments are, in a certain sense, dependent objects; they cannot stand on their own. The datum, on the other hand, is independent, capable of standing on its own. Husserl is, therefore, concerned to pin down this distinction, to state exactly in what it consists.

Mark Twain was far and away the most successful travel writer of his time. Innocents Abroad, published in 1869, sold 67,000 copies in its first twelve months in print, reached about 100,000 a year later, and established its author as the nation's premier humorist. Roughing It, which appeared in 1872, was a triumph of only slightly less gaudy proportions. His reputation firmly established, Mark Twain enjoyed continued success with “Old Times on the Mississippi” (1875), A Tramp Abroad (1880), Life on the Mississippi (1883), and Following the Equator (1897).

Travel writing well suited the humorist, Richard Bridgman observes, because it freed him “to use his special literary gifts . . . short bursts of pointed observations, anecdotes, episodes, and tales. He could examine the diversity of the world without worrying overmuch about such matters as consistency or transitions.”Thanks to “the sequence of the journey itself,” the narratives have “at least a simulacrum of coherence.” Otherwise they are notably weak in structure. This defect, Bridgman goes on, is the outward manifestation of Mark Twain's groping, usually unresolved meditations on “a world whose ostensible order remained tantalizingly elusive for him.” Still, the humorist's digressions can be “importantly revealing” as a guide to “the hidden transactions that the intuition conducts with the “unconscious.”

INTRODUCTION

Husserl pursued philosophy of language not for its own sake but mainly to support his conception of logic. In particular he wished to refute psychologism, the view that the laws of logic are descriptions of regularities in the way we think, which implies that different ways of thinking may embody distinct but equally acceptable logics. Husserl wishes instead to show there is a single logic which is objectively binding for all. This theory was propounded in the Logical Investigations (1900-01), which is where the greater part of Husserl's philosophy of language can be found. Prior to this, Husserl had mentioned language and meaning only in passing in the Philosophy of Arithmetic and in an early (1890) manuscript with the title “On the Logic of Signs (Semiotic)” which is mainly concerned with the division between natural signs (like smoke) and artificial signs (like language). This paper will accordingly focus first on the theory of meaning and language in the Logical Investigations, it will then consider the changes after 1901. These affect chiefly his view of the nature and status of meanings, which underwent a major modification between the Investigations and the Ideas. In comparison with other areas of his philosophy, however, Husserl’s views on language and meaning were relatively stable, and later developments arise primarily because of his elaboration of other issues adjoining the philosophy of language.